


Blessed Soldier Boy

by iimpavid



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst and Humor, Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, F/M, Gen, Human Experimentation, Jewish Character, M/M, Minor Character Death, Neurology & Neuroscience, Slice of Life, Torture, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-01-29 05:44:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12624513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid
Summary: “There should be a law, I thought. If you support a war, if you think it’s worth the price, that’s fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover. A law, I thought.”— Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried(a collection of vignettes about bucky barnes)





	1. Perseverence

“Sergeant James Barnes. Serial number: 32557241.”

 

A heavy sigh from the left. Someone mutters, “Stubborn,” while the authoritative voice comes back with, “Again.”

 

The electrodes are pressed back to his temples. “Sergeant James—“ He gets that much out before the click that heralds the electricity rings out.

 

He chokes on his own voice, a gurgling noise coming out instead of words while his eyes roll back into his head. His body goes taught, burning and straining against the restraints around his limbs and torso. The center of his head burns somewhere deep inside, not just his skin and scalp, and it smells like ash. It’s inside every inch of him. Electricity slithers just under the surface of his skin and pulling muscle away from bone.

 

“Stop,” the authority orders.

 

Just like that, it does. 

 

He can’t feel his face or fingertips. Blinking comes to him slowly—he has to think about the muscles involved, his eyes blinking out of sync with each other—and the ceiling above him is dim, even with the surgical light shining down on him. His tongue is throbbing, swelling. He should be able to taste the blood from the bite but he can’t.

 

The table beneath him is damp. A long breath passes before the reason slots into place: he’s pissed himself. Of  _course_  he has. Insult to injury and all that.

 

“Do you think that did it?”

 

The shrug is evident in the authority’s response, “Let’s find out. What is your name?”

 

A name.  _His_  name.

 

That’s the thing that’s given to children.

 

Was he ever a child?

 

He doesn’t remember.

 

But the authority is asking so he must have a name and he does not want to disappoint. He must have been a child once. If he answers wrong, they’re going to—the word for it isn’t there. But they’re going to do something and it will hurt. 

 

Tongue heavy, he swallows the blood and saliva collecting in his mouth. The first sound he makes is more of a grunt than an attempt at speech. He tries again, forcing his jaw to form the first words that comes to mind, pushing his unresponsive tongue into position against the roof of his mouth. “S—sergeant. James. Bar—nes. Sss—erial number: 32… 557… 24… 1.” 

 

He knows who he is. They want him to forget. He won’t give them that satisfaction. He’s a Jew. A kid from Brooklyn. A damn good sniper, too. 

 

Someone used to call him Bucky.

 

Someone important.

 

“Again.”

 

He whimpers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Tumblr.](https://papcrmooncardboardsea.tumblr.com/) [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/iimpavid)


	2. Stuck the Landing

It’s never the fall that kills people, just the sudden stop. Except for Bucky Barnes who has the miraculous luck of being alive after his swan dive albeit short an arm and unable to feel his legs. He stares up at the train trestle with the clarity only shock or impending death can provide. Sees vividly streaks of blue breaking through the clouds above that. 

 

He thinks, absurdly,  _I gotta get my arm back_. Maybe Morita can stitch it back on or keep it preserved in snow until someone can reattach it to the ragged sinewy stump at his side.

 

The smell of blood and ice are overwhelming and in the distance there is shouting. **  
**

 

He tries to lever himself upright but forgets a crucial fact: he no longer has a left arm. He falls sideways onto the stump where the limb should be. Blacks out face-first in the bloody snow before he can scream.

 

He comes to. His belt makes a handy tourniquet even with clumsy purple fingers. Looking at the snow around him where his weight and blood have melted it to slush and dirt he doesn’t think there’s enough blood left to bother keeping in but standard procedure is standard procedure and onto his stump his belt goes with the help of his right hand and teeth.

 

He thinks,  _At least I jerk off right-handed_. Life is all about being grateful for small blessings..

 

Dizzy and slow he sees his left arm a few yards away. It shouldn’t be all the way over there, it’s not fair, and he crawls toward it. The shouting is closer and he thinks for a second that he should shout back; maybe Steve’s looking for him. Steve should be looking for him. It’s rude as hell to skip out on a party as early as he did, he’s gonna get an earful he’s sure of it.

 

But shouting would take too much breath and he can see the bloodless fingers lying almost in reach. They refuse to flex despite his instruction. The cognitive dissonance of it makes him vomit.

 

He gets his arm and it’s stiff and cold to the touch even to his frost-bitten fingers. He clutches it to his chest and slumps back against the snow. It’s soft like down and wouldn’t it be nice to go back to that Italian village where they had down blankets just lying around in the abandoned hostel? Sure, they’d had fleas then but it’s winter now and they’d all be dead. It’d be great to have a warm blanket to keep out the cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Tumblr.](https://papcrmooncardboardsea.tumblr.com/) [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/iimpavid)


	3. Sunshine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The other night dear, as I lay sleeping  
> I dreamed I held you in my arms  
> But when I awoke, dear, I was mistaken  
> So I hung my head and I cried."
> 
> \- Johnny Cash

“What’dya mean there’s _something wrong with my brain_?”

 

He speaks Russian and English, broken together thanks to some crossed wires. At least, that’s how the scientists explain it. He gets the feeling there’s more to it than that.

 

The room is meticulously clean and bright. It smells of astringent. There is an empty chair six feet in front of him.

 

“Sit still.”

 

The soldier sits still.

 

They’ve shaved his head and run an IV in his right arm. He knows when they start screwing a halo-looking device into his skull because of the shadows on the floor but he can’t feel it.

 

“I don’t like doctor’s offices, so you can understand my trepidation having my head shaved and bein’ dragged into surgery.” No one laughs. He asks, eyes bright, and unafraid because of the sedatives they’re giving him, “What’s that for?”

 

“To stabilize you,” a woman tells him as she is escorted through the operating room door. She has red hair, pulled back and covered up but visible under the thin sterile paper of the surgical cap. She’s wearing scrubs and a surgical mask, but her fingernails are painted and that alone tells him she’s no surgeon. That she probably shouldn’t be here at all.

 

The lights are unbearably bright.

 

“Who’re you?”

 

“Don’t speak such a piggish language when you don’t have to, Kolya, it doesn’t become you,” she tells him and he realizes she’s not speaking English. She says, “I’m Natalia.”

 

He tries to nod but he can’t move anything except his eyes and mouth. The heart rate monitor accelerates. “I’m not—my name is not Kolya.”

 

She looks sympathetic, almost pitying, as she sits there, out of the surgeon’s way, her legs crossed and her hands clasped on top of them. “Yes, it is. You’ve just forgotten. You’re here so the doctors can fix that.”

 

A saw turns on, whirring quietly. They must have already removed the skin of his scalp. He can’t feel them sawing through bone, but he thinks he might be able to smell it. His teeth buzz with it.

 

“Will it hurt?”

 

“No, that’s why I’m here, Kolya. You’ll answer the questions they ask you and I will make sure you don’t hurt yourself.”

 

And he is grateful, as the surgery begins, for the woman’s presence. Natalia. He tries to remember that her name is Natalia.

 

Something inside his head is tapped and he hears it like lightning in his teeth. Several things happen at once. The operating room is gone and he can only smell car exhaust on the wind. Summer wind. It’s too hot to be alive and there are melted oil pastels leaking all over the one desk in the apartment.

 

He hears music playing in the distance, not the sort you swing to but the kind that needs you to hold a dame close and lead a box step, nothing more. If you’re real lucky she’ll lay her head on your shoulder.

 

It’s melancholy and sweet.

 

He’s singing to himself low and a bit off key.

 

There’s a man with blonde hair in the kitchen.

 

He’s in love for the space of a breath.

 

His mind goes blank and he blinks.

 

There are people talking to him, over him, louder than they should. There is a woman sitting across from him. He can’t move except to blink and speak. The woman, he knows he should know her.

 

“The other night, dear, I dreamt I held you in my arms,” he tells her, because the words are the only thing that come to mind. The language isn’t right, it shouldn’t be in Russian, but he can’t think of the one it’s supposed to be.

 

She cocks her head.

 

The others in the room are still talking to him. “Soldier, how do you feel?”

 

His face is wet and he thinks it might be blood—except that can’t be right, because he’s in surgery and if the mess is that bad he should be dead. Yes, he remembers that. He thinks he might be crying.

 

Outside, someone shouts, “You incompetent fucks what did you do to it? Do you have any idea how much is invested in—”

 

He frowns at the woman across from him. “Natalia,” he says, and that gets her attention again. “Are they done yet?”

 

She shakes her head. “No. You hallucinated, and they had to stop for a time. What year is it?”

 

He tries to shrug and panics briefly when he realizes he can’t; not a single muscle in his body will respond to command. He says, “I - I don’t know.”

 

She makes eye contact with someone behind him, then looks back at him and nods. “That’s a good thing. How do you feel?”

 

“Kinda light headed, like my skull’s been cut open.”

 

Natalia nods again. If she’s noticed his levity it doesn’t show on her face. It’s comforting that she doesn’t ask his name. There are many names in his head, but none of them are his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Tumblr.](https://papcrmooncardboardsea.tumblr.com/) [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/iimpavid)


	4. Testing Scenario

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The paralytic effect of the anesthesia is wearing off sooner than anticipated, doctor.”
> 
>  
> 
> “Proceeding with the experiment may prove detrimental to your health—“
> 
>  
> 
> “Nonsense. He poses no threat.”

 

The first lesson is this: everything is a test.

 

The Soldier opens his eyes underwater.

 

It’s only a matter of time before he floats to the surface. He carefully does not indulge his lungs’ desire to inhale.

 

He can hear a conversation if he strains. It’s muffled by the pearlescent liquid but the effort takes his mind off breathing.

 

“The paralytic effect of the anesthesia is wearing off sooner than anticipated, doctor.”

 

“Proceeding with the experiment may prove detrimental to your health—“

 

“Nonsense. He poses no threat.”

 

It’s like floating in his mother’s pearls if they’d been melted down to thick, cool syrup. Some ambient light source has the world, dim and opaque as it is, tinged amber. Freshwater pearls dyed to match her wedding dress, a gift from her mother-in-law for luck. She sold them in 1933 so they could have coal for the stove through the winter.

 

The world reels.

 

In his right ear, he hears a voice tell him, “Inhaling will not hurt you. You are safe,  _soldat,_  the liquid is breathable.”

 

It is a reassurance but not an order and he will not treat it as one.  _Will not._

 

His throat burns with stubborn, fearful refusal to trust the voice in the water. Sensation is coming back to his extremities; his left arm doesn’t throb quite like something so recently damaged should. He recalls the shots, the exposed wiring, the disappointment in the authority that he broke such valuable equipment.

 

Another voice in his ear. Neither male nor female; the voice of the authority: “Take a deep breath.”

 

Obedience, he knows, will be rewarded and instinct is the enemy of progress. His jaw relaxes open before he makes the conscious decision to try to breathe.

 

Inhaling so deep uses throat and nose and for a split second he is overwhelmed with the smell of chlorine. His body tries to swallow as much as it can. Chalky and warm, the liquid goes down easily but it isn’t enough to lower the level so he can reach the surface and breathe. He gasps and convulses, limbs clawing through water to grasp at nothing. He hits a glass wall with a flat palm, hears the impact reverberate through the liquid.

 

The authority is talking to him but he cannot hear them. Obedience has given way to panic.

 

Are they decommissioning him?

 

Has he failed?

 

Liquid fills his lungs and he goes still to drown in his mother’s pearls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Tumblr.](https://papcrmooncardboardsea.tumblr.com/) [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/iimpavid)


	5. Grief

It was an old lesson. One of the earliest:  _When the stakes are high would you rather have the lone wolf or the pack?_ **  
**

 

 _Yasha! Stop making eyes at Dunia down your scope and pay attention._  Zhenya was the most impatient of them all and should never have been anything but an assault weapon. He certainly did not belong on Yasha’s six watching over the others and waiting.

 

The answer was always  _the pack_.

 

Bucky stares at the Soldiers who were, in effect, his packmates and are now so much dead meat in their respective freezers. Helmut Zemo is talking, something about empires and the ways in which they might fall but Bucky only hears names:   _Nikolai, Dunia, Vaska, Zhenya, Timur_.

 

_I’ll make eyes at whoever the hell I want– when’s it ever screwed up my shot, huh?_

 

Timur and Dunia liked it when their cover aliases were couples as if no one knew what they were up to and how dangerous their game was. (Nevermind the fact that he was watching Timur, not Dunia.) The authority knew, every one of the Soldiers was sure of it, but would do nothing unless this game interfered with their missions. Timur and Dunia knew better than to let it interfere.

 

They had hunted together. 

 

A strange species of grief makes itself known then drowns in the frantic need to survive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Tumblr.](https://papcrmooncardboardsea.tumblr.com/) [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/iimpavid)


	6. Banned for Life

Capriotti’s is one of the oldest, less-gentrified bars left in Brooklyn sporting original brick walls, naked pipes to the higher floors, and fashionable strings of edison bulbs in the windows. It boasts a 1925 opening date, an easy bakers’ dozen of unsuccessful Prohibition Era raids, and the best fried pickles on the eastern seaboard. On any given night it hums with activity. Salvador Capriotti, Jr. tends the bar while his daughters, Mia and Darla, wait tables, collect gossip, bounce the occasional miscreant unfortunate and drunk enough to rouse their ire.

 

On the back wall, visible from every corner, hang dozens of pictures around a hand-painted sigh that reads “BANNED FOR LIFE”. The place of highest honor goes to a frame holding two vintage photographs labeled, in Sal Capriotti, Sr.’s looping script, “Steven Grant Rogers, alias Captain America & James “Bucky” Buchanan Barnes”. The framed photos have been kept dust-free over the last 70 years, Sal Jr. climbs the ladder to dust them himself, and carefully placed into the edges of the frames are more recent, color photos of Capriotti’s most infamous customers.

 

Bucky’s surprised the place is still standing. He takes it in from across the street, decides, “What’s the worst that could happen?” And drags Steve in with him.

 

The Capriotti daughters stop and gape which is what gets Sal Jr.’s attention. He has none of his daughters’ enthusiasm for masked buffoons running around the city in colorful underpants, he’ll tell anyone who asks, and he flings his bar rag at Bucky’s face. “Get outta here! You! Out! Right the hell now you godforsaken, graceless goons!” This is how they end up bounced by an elderly Italian man who might blow over in a strong breeze.

 

The incident that led to them being banned in the first place is the stuff of legend and neither of them can agree whose fault it was. Bucky will go to his grave swearing up and down that it was entirely Steve’s fault— “You don’t just pick a fight with a dozen sailors over eugenics and voting rights when you’re the size of a turnip, Steve.”

 

If Bucky’s dating all five of Sal Sr.’s daughters simultaneously and getting caught running them around had an influence on the ensuing brawl, well, the important part isn’t any of that. The thing that Sal Sr. cared about most, that got two future national icons banned from the best bar in Brooklyn (nay, in New York City) wasn’t the sailors’ lost teeth, the broken chairs and table legs, no. It was the booze shelves. In the brawl all three of them had collapsed, taking every single bottle they housed with them in a shattering wave of alcoholic tragedy. So they get kicked out of Capriotti’s because Sal Sr.’s lifetime ban is completely serious, apparently, even from beyond the grave (may he rest in peace). It makes the cover of Star Magazine. It’s a little bit embarrassing.

 

Bucky sits on the balcony of the brownstone he shares with Steve smoking and scrolling idly. His thumb pauses. His eyes widen. He shouts back into the house, “Steve! You’re never gonna guess who I found on the Facebook!” Grinning, he mutters to himself, “Darla Capriotti’s gonna be my new best friend.”

 

He will be readmitted to Capriotti’s and he will have Capriotti’s fried pickles again. He is the master of his own fate. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Tumblr.](https://papcrmooncardboardsea.tumblr.com/) [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/iimpavid)

**Author's Note:**

> [Why don't y'all come say hey over on Tumblr.](https://papermoon-cardboardsea.tumblr.com/)


End file.
